updated 01:35 pm EDT, Tue July 26, 2011

RIM BlackBerry senior VP may have left

RIM may have lost one of its more important executives in what could be the start of a wider exodus. A claim by multiple sources Tuesday has Suresh Periyalwar, the company's Senior VP of Handheld Software, has supposedly backed out. It wasn't evident from BGR's sources if the BlackBerry lead had voluntarily quit or if he had been pushed out or if he was part of RIM's 2,000 job cuts.

The executive may also inadvertently be part of a group of executives that would quit "on their own accord," according to a separate but supposedly reliable informer.

RIM has been contacted about the story but hasn't had an opportunity to respond as of this writing. LinkedIn (above) still shows Periyalwar as working at RIM but isn't in itself a guarantee of his current status.

If real, the move would come just as RIM is expecting its steepest decline yet in shipments and is depending heavily on a wave of new BlackBerry 7 phones to recover. Periyalwar might be less necessary now that the company is moving on to phones using the QNX-based roots from the BlackBerry PlayBook and has a new architecture.